Save the Swales!

Enviros take the water district battle to the green streets.

BUDGET HOLES: Bureau of Environmental Services engineers say they plan to spend $100 million in the next five years on capital projects that include green infrastructure, like this “green street” being installed on Southeast Clay Street. - IMAGE: Bethlayne Hansen

On a rainy afternoon,
workers in hardhats are digging a hole deep into the sidewalk at the
corner of Southeast 9th Avenue, a block south of Hawthorne Boulevard’s
Helium Comedy Club. The hole will soon be filled with a stormwater
planter—a pot of dirt and grass that collects and absorbs the Portland
drizzle.

But the planters are
part of a 12-block, $2 million “green street” project that
environmentalists say is threatened by businesses and activists trying
to grab control of the city’s water and sewer bureaus.

Backers of a ballot
measure to create a public water district scored another victory this
month when Mayor Charlie Hales admitted the city had misspent $70,000 in
utility money to purchase a police building under Mayor Sam Adams.

Supporters have
gathered more than half the 30,000 voter signatures required to place
the initiative on the ballot—outraged by the spending of ratepayer
dollars on such pet projects as the Portland Loo (“Money Bucket,” WW, May 15, 2013).

But that expense is a
drop in the bucket compared to another legacy of the Adams
administration: the city’s “Grey to Green” initiative, a $39 million
grid of bioswales, green streets, newly planted trees and eco-roofs
designed to reduce the flow of stormwater into the city’s sewer pipes.

Grey to Green is one
of a dozen Bureau of Environmental Services programs singled out as
violations of the city charter in a $127 million lawsuit filed against
the city last year by lawyer John DiLorenzo, an ally of the water
district backers.

Other items the
lawsuit mentioned as possible misuses of city money? Any “green street”
expenses associated with bike boulevards; money spent on trees and
greenspaces “under the pretext of stormwater management”; the sewer
bureau’s contribution to the River Plan, which tried to implement new
environmental rules for the Willamette River; and costs of the Portland
Harbor Superfund investigation.

Environmental
advocates look at that list and see a full-scale assault on the city’s
programs to separate stormwater from sewage and clean up the Portland
Harbor.

“Portland’s
put a tremendous amount of work into proving these strategies are
greener, cheaper and more effective than traditional pipe-based
strategies,” says Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon
Society of Portland. “The way we read this lawsuit, and the rhetoric of
the campaign since it began, is a direct attack on the core green
programs of the city.”

Kent Craford,
co-petitioner for the water district initiative, says the district
wouldn’t touch green streets and bioswales. He says the lawsuit seeks
only to identify improper uses of ratepayer money—like tax breaks for
eco-roofs.

“The whole allegation
is really a big straw man,” Craford says. “We’ve never taken issue with
green streets. The insiders that are sucking on the sewer trough, they
want to keep the gravy train going.”

But Craford says the new district would stop using sewer bills to pay Superfund investigation costs.

“Is a family in East Portland responsible for the PCBs put into the river 120 years ago?” he asks.

The amount of money
at stake is huge. The Bureau of Environmental Services has spent $25.7
million since 2008 investigating the scope of a federally mandated
Superfund cleanup in Portland Harbor. It spent another $80 million on
“Tabor to the River,” a grid of green streets, bioswales and street
trees installed throughout Southeast Portland.

In a 2000 study, the
city found it could shave $64 million off a $144 million price tag by
installing green infrastructure in Southeast Portland instead of wider
sewer pipes.

“I can’t really
comment on the political aspects of it,” says Bill Ryan, the bureau’s
chief engineer. “But just to not do green infrastructure because you’re
nervous about it and don’t understand it will cost the ratepayers a
tremendous amount of money.”